My Ph. D.,
which I began at Edge Hill in 2012, is concerned with investigating the ways
that digital technology can be used in the area of innovative poetry in general
and in relation to conceptualism and the Oulipo in particular.

Computers, in
the developed world at least, are so widespread as to be unavoidable. There are
good and bad things about this. One thing is for sure is that whether we like
it or not, computers are not going away. If King Canute were demonstrating the
limits of his power today, he would not order the tide to turn back; he would
try and delete himself from Facebook.

I am not a
year zero zealot and I do not define my practice solely by the use of
technology. In fact, I don’t define in that way at all. I am simply using what
lies to hand. I am not interested in the machine per se, or in its undoubted capacity to produce dazzling artefacts.
Trying to write a program that passes the Turing test by producing output that
is indistinguishable from that of a human is a dead end. Human beings can write
like human beings and there are over 7 billion of us. What I am interested in
is what happens when technology is used as an adjunct to human practice. The
pioneers of computer poetry had to book hours of ruinously expensive processing
time on institutional mainframes. Now, we carry in our pockets devices many
times more powerful than the machines that helped put people on the moon. Using
a computer is no more remarkable than using an iron, a toaster or a lawnmower.
The digital has become everyday. Programs and apps can be thought of as tools
to be picked up and dropped in the way an artist might a tube of paint or a
pair of scissors.

The work
presented here, a selection from a 172 stanza re-imagining of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy ofMelancholy, was created using Twitter. In other works, I
have used spreadsheets to cut up texts, database programs to re-configure and
transform them and mobile phone technology to generate them. All the software I
use is readily commercially available and whilst my skill level is probably
above average, it is by no means stratospheric.

Many poets use
technology, but more hold it in suspicion. Inherent in this is distrust not
just of technology, but also of the value of procedure and process. Incorporating
non-human elements into the creative process violates the still prevalent
notion of the poet as seer whose proper focus is on the world within. I have no
problem with confessional work or self-expression. Rather, it is my belief that
self-expression is automatic and unavoidable and so need not be actively
pursued like a rare and elusive beast. A musician is not being any less
expressive when using a synthesiser than when using a piano or a lute. A poet
is not being any less expressive when using an Android app than when using a
typewriter or a quill. Poetry must engage with the world as it is in its
totality. Digital technology is part of that world.

'The best link for me,' Tom says, 'is http://zshboo.org,
which has links to everywhere else.' And here's an internal link to a piece Tom wrote in 2008, here.

The Bluecoat’s annual celebration of Merseyside-born author of Under the
Volcano, Malcolm Lowry (1909-57), featured the European launch of
his 'lost' novel In Ballast to the White Sea, on Saturday 25th
October. Along with Ailsa Cox, Bryan Biggs, Mark Goodall, Helen Tookey and
Colin Dilnot, I am one of the ‘Firminists’ who ‘coordinate’ the event, though
the massive lion’s share of organising is carried out by Bryan. TheFirministis the work of Mark. This year Colin conducted one of his Lowry walks around the sights and sites of the life and fiction, Bryan spoke and played appropriate music, I interviewed Iain Sinclair,
Mark launched The Firminist, Helen
Tookey read her new ‘Bellevue Sonnets’ and Ailsa interviewed editors Vik Doyen,
Colin Dilnot and Patrick McCarthy. (See postings of previous years here and
here. And visit Colin's detailed Lowry website The Nineteenth Hole here.)

Sheet music of the famous song in Under the Volcano; one impressive Firminst discovery. A few years ago we all sang it along to a taropatch orchestra.

The Lowry Lounge 2014 featured Iain
Sinclair talking about Lowry in relation to his 2013 book American Smoke.
I introduced him thus:

Good afternoon. I’m Robert Sheppard, one of the Liverpool
Firminists dedicated to the continuing promotion of the life and works and
beverages of Malcolm Lowry.

This afternoon we are pleased to welcome Iain Sinclair to
the Lowry Lounge. Iain is one of Britain’s most acclaimed but
independent-minded authors. A poet since the 1970s – when I first picked up on
his work, via the poetry and prose volume LudHeat, which today would be called a work of psychogeography, but was then
the major exemplar of a ‘poetry of place’. After a period as a bookseller (an important
fact) he became a novelist, and White
Chappel, Scarlet Tracings traces the bloody trail of the Ripper murders and
the even bloodier and occult trade of bookdealing. Downriver is a masterly epic take on Thatcher’s London. Other novels and fictions followed,
but he set out – in the ambulatory documentaries about London – Lights out for the Territory, London Orbital, and Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire – and about elsewhither locations –
John Clare’s East Anglian landscapes in The
Edge of Orison and even the Liverpool-Hull trek which threaded through his
demolition of Grand Projects in Ghost
Milk – to discover (but also perhaps to invent) truths about these
places.

But there is an essential interweaving of genres in these
books. Tucked away under the preliminary reiterations of the title of his most
recent book American Smoke is its
sub-sub-title: ‘A Fiction of Memory’, which suggests that documentary of the
kind written by Iain – which consists of not trusting official guides to places
and people or received ideas about culture and nature – but of (usually
literally) walking out into the territory and finding out for himself, is
partly a fictive activity. Writing the thing makes the thing happen. The
sponsored strategy has long been the path to avoid. The most doomed is the most
attractive; failure is alluring. Some of you will see a parallel with Lowry
here. American Smoke is an
exploration of the fact that, as Britons, ‘American Smoke infiltrates our
cloudy night’, and Iain explores the American continent – as for Lowry that
includes Canada and Mexico – hoovering up his poetic heroes – Olson, Burroughs,
Bolano, Snyder – but leaving room for English writers such as Alexander Baron
and – of course – Malcolm Lowry. While the book frequently has chapters and
passages about each of these heroes, any one of them pops up in unlikely
contexts with coincidences, correspondences and parallels drawn or –more
mysteriously – found. Again, this suggests that Lowry is more than just a
subject; he is a guiding spirit in some ways to this project; these ‘journeys
to the end of the light’.

Ladies and gentlemen, Iain Sinclair.

Iain then spoke freely, making connections between Liverpool
and Dublin,
bringing in Joyce, Eleanor Philby, and finally Lowry. He read from the opening chapter of Ulysses, the ultimate wandering novel,
and noted that the mailboats mentioned were heading to Liverpool.
(Having just taught Ulysses I can
state that I didn’t get that reference to Liverpool, though the cattle with or
without foot and mouth are being shipped to Liverpool, and there are two
addresses mentioned, in an obituary in a paper (Canning St.) and the home of
the eager hangman, Hunter St. Not enough for a walking tour, like the one
conducted by Colin Dilnot on Saturday morning, which I missed, but went on a
couple of years ago, here.) Iain read some ‘Lowry’ passages from American Smoke.

After there were questions. These are my notes:

I’m going to ask a couple of questions and then throw it
open to the audience, most of whom are more knowledgeable about Lowry than
myself.

1. When I was writing my little book on your work, which
begins with the borrowed thesis that ‘all of’ your ‘books are book-length footnotes to’ your ‘other books’, as
Nicholas Lezard says – I reached a point where I slammed on the brakes and
thought: Malcolm Lowry: ‘The Voyage that Never Ends’, the interconnected nature
of the oeuvre! And I paused to look for his presence in the work, and didn’t
find it at that point. I know you read Lowry back in your student days in Dublin, but I wonder why
it took so long for him to surface consciously. And I
wonder what you feel about my suggestion of parallels in terms of scope, style
and even attitude between your work and his?

2. You
write: ‘I was interested in the cunning ways ML found to lose, burn, scatter
his manuscripts, before he had to face the horrors of making a submission, or,
worse still, publication.’ I wonder what you think (or possibly can guess what
Lowry would have thought) about the efforts of worldwide scholars and local Firminists
to find, dampen down, unscatter his manuscripts?

3.
Margerie Bonner Lowry is an ambiguous figure in your account, as she is in
most. You’ve sold, then bought back, decades later, the same copies of her
novels, and you’ve read them. But
they seemed to offer you less than you’d expected. Am I right in suspecting
that?

I didn’t
use question 2. the audience then
took over. Iain was engaged and particular in his responses. The impression was
of a man who knows there are no coincidences, just correspondences (and there
the connection with Lowry runs deepest).

Iain Sinclair signing books

Covers of issues of The Firminist

Copies of The Firminist may be obtained by emailing the editor at m.goodall@bradford.ac.uk. After Launch of TheFirminist, edited by Mark
Goddall with Helen Tookey reading her poems, In Ballast to the White Sea was
launched with the book’s editor Patrick McCarthy, giving a long account of
the editing of this incomplete manuscript, followed by Vik Doyen talking about the genesis of Swinging the Maelstrom, which he edited, in conversation with Patrick and Colin
Dilnott, and Ailsa chairing. The impressive book is published by the University of Ottawa Press.

Iain Sinclair in convivial mood. Behind him Patrick McCarthy, in the foregound Vik Doyen, top left, Tim Power, whose pictures will be better than these!

After
this saga of the state of manuscripts, the meddling of (other, earlier)
editors, I walked over to Iain and said, ‘Burn everything!’ (He won’t; it’s
already shipped out to Texas.)
We chatted about drafts, styles of composition, uses of the computer, etc. This
social part (the annual toast to Lowry with mesqual or tequila) was most
convivial and the highlight perhaps was talking to The Last of the Lowrys, as I
erroneously dubbed him, who was somewhat bemused by our interest in the Black
Sheep of his family. He looked like Malcolm so it was oddly moving. (The
granddaughter of Lowry’s mentor, Conrad Aiken, was also in attendance.) Then it
was off to the Everyman, The Roscoe Head…

In my bag I
have three unopened codexes: the novel itself, The Firminist 4, and Iain’s new book, 70X70: Unlicensed Preaching: A Life Unpacked in 70 Films.

I undertook a PhD in Poetics
(1997-2002) as the first to do so at what was then Edge Hill College of Higher
Education. My supervisor was Robert Sheppard – a quite possibly unique relationship
since he had been teaching me ‘A’ Level English in Surrey only some six years previously!
I had an amazing, expansive time at Edge Hill, not only as a research student,
but also as a regular part-time lecturer – cutting my teeth on teaching TESOL,
Creative Writing and English Literature. I felt very much part of the team and
still remember fondly the departmental habit of having lunch together, which is
so rare as to be practically extinct these days. It was huge fun working
alongside Helen Newall and Julie Armstrong-Colton on the first year modules in
particular.

In order to support the opening
stages of my doctoral work I sat in on the Literary Theory seminars for the MA
Creative Writing. There was amazing cohort that year and I’m still in touch
with many of them, even working with one of them (Ursula Hurley) in my current
job at Salford! Being involved in the (still extant) Edge Hill Poetry and
Poetics Research Group was also a special part of my experience – giving and
receiving intent and sustained feedback on my writing that has remained
unequalled. Robert’s important work on poetics was crucial to my development as
a researcher and lecturer in Creative Writing – and I worked with him as a
research assistant on a project investigating the use of poetics in teaching
for the English Subject Centre. This research was referenced in the NAWE
benchmarking statement for Creative Writing – the first for the discipline in
Higher Education.

As a PhD student I was extremely
fortunate to have the presence of Pam Jackson as my internal examiner for my
viva – and still recall her brilliant insights about readerships and
writerships which she offered during the two and a half hour (!) examination. I
also want to acknowledge the invaluable support of Alastair McCulloch and Julie
Proud in the Research Office as it then was.

I still regularly attend poetry
readings at the Rose Theatre and fondly remember participating in the annual
National Poetry Day readings – on one occasion performing the sound poetry of
the late, great Bob Cobbing alongside Robert. My working life has not taken me
far away and in fact has recently led me back to Edge Hill as I begin a new
research collaboration with colleagues in the Dance department. I look forward
to continuing to develop my relationship with Edge Hill well into the next 25
years.

Monday, October 13, 2014

I performed as part of the soft opening (!) of 8 Water St last
Thursday. Jo Blowers, Steve Boyland and I performed a three voice piece, using as text my stuttered
version of a poem from A TranslatedMan. Kybartai Noctune Remodel (Revolutionary Song Number 2) It's a reworking of the original poem, which begins:

Kybartai Noctune

what is that sound

humming like an antique fridge packed with ice

the hint of a turbine something turning

a patient siren rising and falling....

The poem has been reversioned thus (using the technique deployed in 'Revolutionary Song', of which I posted the colour version here some days ago):

what is that sound humming like an antique
is that sound humming like an antique fridge
that sound humming like an antique fridge packed
sound humming like an antique fridge packed with
humming like an antique fridge packed with ice

It is Rene Van Valckenborch’s version of a poem by Lithuanian Jurgita Zujūtė (1966-), a poet he invented (though I invented him, of course). None of that matters in the performance.

Jo is a dancer (seen above) but the dancing dropped out of this piece to leave only a vocal trio. Steve is a
singer and vocal artist (who works a lot with Scott Thurston). I’m a writer and
the third voice.

Some people said they liked it a lot. Here's a video of Steve performing with Veryan Weston on piano, a player I have also featured here on Pages.

Friday, October 10, 2014

Alice Lenkiewicz was an English and Art graduate of the BA programme at Edge Hill University: she is a well-published poet and fiction writer, AND a visual artist and gallery owner. All the images, book covers and otherwise, are by Alice.

Poems from Maxine

Maxine

Published by bluechrome publishing

2005

ISBN: 1904781721

Exercise 4 in floating

eyes open eyes shut

in space (someone I once knew)

darkness empty road

head rotates

mechanism of distant tears

key floats away

towards shimmering

wet pavement

casting remains of blindness departed the empty room

towards emptiness to store things precious to cast

and bury the surface a clear stone of greyness covered

all six through doors greying further in-between myself

gliding an area base since walking to store things

burns the cast mixture with sadness since that is the red

of it placed inside the tide within the inner pulling

edges beyond the darkness

Poems from Men Hate Blondes

The Fire Starters

In 1932

He shed his shoes

Walked past the grey

Drab apartment blocks

And entered the forest

Of rising flames where an unfamiliar

Sky followed a trail of amber smoke

Above the vivid horizon

An eagle watched

The empty silence the good

And safe place smoke

Moving but silent

There was a moment of consideration

As he entered the clearing

Redwood trees

And fragments

Translucent in shadows

The 1929 St Valentine's Day Massacre

we walked
the river

land
without shadows

everywhere
knowing

you’ve lost all sense of shame

the sun
unfastens a still

café
triggers the “raid”

for hooch
as the mob fired

seven victims at 2122

not a word
spoken

each time
returning

footsteps
come into our lives

in the view of streetlamps

my eyes
weeping

snow is
falling

there he
lies body black

dreaming of strange cities

secrets
gather the sleepy

horizon to
lose identity

re-enter
the real world

to
have nothing else to give

as the
light fell away

i stood
there beside the

wonder
wheel

as the sea soothes this first day

Clubbing:

Fleeting light glides a thought while eyes ponder
the madness of gold. Between insults, jealousy of glitter creates a sleek
glance.

∆

Her sight demands no chance for the hurt to see
inside. Completion of isolation will extend towards the ceiling inside a pink
haze.

∆

Interference rejects the smile but now there is
movement and desire only in the memory. The faking is possible underneath a
glass floor, or is it fate.

∆

Enough punching ground for later. Gold is an
illusion. Only one door here. Lights obey. Maybe the glow is the after-thought.
But did it really happen.

∆

There is nothing to fear. Her immobile state creates
a line of falling statues. Walls are vital for advice. Tables and chairs in need
of the right balance. Anguish creates the prize.

∆

Remnants of voices magnify the emptiness of the
night before in front of scattered particles. The ritual guarded by her vision
of a miracle, vodka cuts through her body.

∆

No good pretending it didn’t happen. Anger of course
was always part of it. Never a reason to look official in black.